Look up "shooting self in (insert body part here)" and you'll find this not so photogenic picture of this country's "can't do" space guy. Directly contradicting his boss, Viceroy Hanley told the National Space Club in Cocoa Beach this week that increased appropriations would not significantly narrow the gap between the end of the shuttle program in 2010 and the first crewed Constellation flight in 2014 (or 2015 or 2016, whenever). Yet the Emperor has repeatedly claimed that an additional $2B could deliver astronauts to the ISS just three years after shuttle retirement.
"This is a big thing," said Hanley. "There's only a limit to which I can accelerate things once I've slowed them down."
Kind of looks like he just sat on an ARES-1 model, doesn't it?
This wrong stuff stands in stark contrast to two most powerful women in the Senate, Mikulski and Hutchinson, putting their reputations on the line for him and his fellow minions. After all of their efforts, Hanley thanks them by saying he doesn't need the money and it won't help anyway.
Hanley's job should be to take what he might receive (who refuses $2B?) and make it work like the Senators told their colleagues it would. If he can't get ORION/ARES-1 in the air earlier with another $2B, just what can he do?
Who wants in on the dead pool?
2 comments:
I read somewhere http://rocketsandsuch.blogspot.com/2007/12/yikes-indeed.html "Yikes, Indeed!" that the J-2x would take 5 million hours to develop. Maybe they could retrain all of the shuttle related employee's to design and build rocket engine's and squeeze 5 million hours into three years.
The half life of a NASA program/project manager is about 2.0 years. Hanley has survived longer than most. A major reorg and reshuffle is inevitable in the near future. See ISS program management history, for example.
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